CARPE DIEM: Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson

[RonPrice (RonPrice)]

This Latin expression, carpe diem, "seize the day," has been making the rounds in popular culture more frequently in recent years--and I write about this idea in the following prose-poem.
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Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson set to work early in 1963 putting their radio astronomy receiving system together. I had no idea at the time since I was 18 and studying nine matriculation subjects in the most demanding part of my formal education. My interest in sport and girls back then far exceeded my enthusiasm for either physics or astronomy. In the early months of 1963, as the Baha’is of the world were preparing to hold their first international election, these two American scientists, Penzias and Wilson, were most concerned about the quality of the components they were adding to the system they were developing. It was a system they had been given to do their work and the existing components of that system had superb properties for the work in which they were engaged.

These two men began a series of radio astronomical observations so as to make the best use of the careful calibration and extreme sensitivity of their system. Of the various projects they were working on, the most technically challenging was a measurement of the radiation intensity from the Milky Way galaxy at high latitudes. This endeavor resulted in the accidental discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation.

Wilson gave a detailed description of the development of their system in his 1978 Nobel lecture. Their discovery established the Big Bang theory as the unquestionable and leading contender by far for the explanation of the origins of the universe. For this discovery they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978. -Ron Price with thanks toArno Penzias, “Autobiography,” Nobelprize.org; and Robert Wilson, Nobel Lecture, 8

The balance of opinion
was now shifting to the
Big Bang hypothesis,
just as the cold war was
moving into another phase
and science was consolidating
some of its early efforts to
reach beyond our planet.

And I was becoming an adult
moving into another phase of
my life in an infinitely complex
system known as the lifespan.

Ron Price
Tasmania